Extreme Chess Championships part IV: the Final

The fourth episode of the Extreme Chess Championships was recently published and uploaded to YouTube. In this chess reality TV show, created by Jennifer Shahade, her brother Greg Shahade and Daniel Meirom, a group of young Americans of different cultures fight each other at the board with 15 minutes plus 5 seconds increment. The games are played at the offices of Chess-in-the-Schools, the New York City non-profit that brings chess to kids all over the city.

In the dramatic finals of the Extreme “X Chess” Championships, 13-year-old Justus Williams plays Stanford student Elliott Liu, 22. Both players defy the traditional image of chessplayers. Justus is the top board on the powerhouse Brooklyn middle school IS 318, and was just featured on the Rachel Maddow show, and the New York Times. Elliott is a fun-loving college senior who attends music festivals like Coachella on the weekends while maintaining both a strong international chess ranking and a demanding schedule at Stanford University.

The fourth and final episode crowns the first-ever Extreme “X Chess” Champion, who takes home a cash prize, the title and an automatic bid into the second season of X Chess. Co-creator and director Daniel Meirom talked about potential second season of the Extreme Chess Championships, “It will be even more exciting as fans learn more about the personalities behind the game as well as key strategies from beautiful checkmates to running your opponent out of time.”

The Extreme Chess Championships is a made for TV competition that showcases the drama of chess and the rush of checkmate. The pace in this single elimination knockout competition, also known as X Chess, is much closer to basketball than golf—each player has less than 20 minutes to complete all his or her moves. The show aims to heighten the awareness of chess and to prove that intellectual pursuits can create thrilling television.

The Extreme Chess Championships is created by filmmaker Daniel Meirom, US Chess League founder and International Master Greg Shahade and author and two-time US Women’s Champion Jennifer Shahade. X Chess is hosted by model and actress Kacie Marie. Jeopardy! Champion Jonathan Corbblah, who has appeared on ESPN, Cash Cab and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, provides accessible commentary with Jennifer Shahade. The event was hosted at Chess-In-The-Schools, a New York non-profit.

You can find the X Chess Champs on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We previously wrote about them in this and this and this article, where you can find the trailer and the first three episodes.